We most welcome your interest in becoming a startup project partner for our students this upcoming semester (Sep - Nov 2021).

Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Lab at The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law (LITE Lab@HKU) is an interdisciplinary and experiential programme to better prepare our next generation of legal professionals and support our often under-resourced Hong Kong tech, startup, social entrepreneurship and NGO ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, LITE Lab@HKU currently offers courses designed to immerse undergraduate and postgraduate students from the Law and other faculties in real-world transactional, legal and policy issues faced by tech companies, startups, social enterpreneurs, and other under-resourced organizations in Hong Kong.

For the upcoming Sep-Nov 2021semester, LITE Lab@HKU is offering 2 opportunities for Hong Kong tech startups and social entrepreneurs to collaborate as project partners with our students on co-designed projects. Since LITE Lab students participate as part of for-credit courses (120-180 hours of student learning), there is no charge for participating companies. Students spend 9-10 hours per week working on their project deliverables, and we welcome project partners giving the students the opportunity to visit and do some research from your offices (although this would be subject to the ongoing COVID situation).

(1) LITE Lab: Tech Startup Law + research projects (LLAW6302)

Postgraduate Law students (full time and part time) gain practical experience working with under-resourced Hong Kong tech startups and social entrepreneurs on co-designed legal and policy research projects. Students will be working largely independently on their research project deliverables, with regular check-ins from the project partners.

Matches are made based primarily on student selections of their preferred project partners and projects.

In the past, our LITE Lab@HKU students have conducted legal and policy research in a wide variety of areas relating to tech startups and social entrepreneurs, including cutting-edge areas such as AI protection, blockchain applications and data protection, as well as on cross-border expansion of their businesses.  

As many of our postgraduate students are law graduates from Mainland China, they may be particularly suited for legal and policy research relating to the Greater Bay Area and Chinese law.

* Next semester Feb- May 2022, we will be offering a similar course with undergraduate students as well as undergraduate and postgraduate student Internships. Last year, we received more than 120 under-resourced organisations seeking to collaborate with LITE Lab@HKU and its students.

(2) LITE Lab: Lawtech & Regtech Sandbox (LLAW3272)

Undergraduate students from Law, computer science, business and other disciplines gain practical experience working with under-resourced Hong Kong organizations on co-designed proof-of-concept lawtech and regtech  based on no-code/low-code document automation and workflow platforms (eg, Checkbox; Documate; Josef; plus Microsoft) to address your real world pain-points.

Some examples you may consider include:

- commonly used template documents (eg, NDAs, employee letters, legal declarations);
- legal triage automation (eg, compliance FAQs); and
- corporate approvals (eg, document review processes).

Some projects may be very bespoke to your organisation - if you like the PoC and want to implement it, we would be pleased to introduce you to our relevant Lawtech/Regtech Tech Partners and their SaaS platforms. Other projects may be benefit similar startups and under-resourced organisations - with mutual consent, LITE Lab@HKU may be willing to host such projects on our website so that you and other parties can benefit from it. In either case, there no further obligations and it is a win-win solution for all without any cost !

Our LITE Lab: Lawtech & Regtech Sandbox was honoured to recently be nominated as the only university-led  initiative for the inaugural Financial Times Innovative Lawyer's Collaborative Innovation Award 2021!

* If you would like to be a project partner for our Lawtech & Regtech Sandbox, you will also need to complete another online form

Please note that:

(a)  neither LITE Lab@HKU students nor instructors are licensed to provide legal advice, and any work project or communication should not be construed as legal advice nor relied upon as such;

(b) neither LITE Lab@HKU students nor instructors are licensed to practice law, and so there is legal professional privilege regarding any communication, including this form. Accordingly, please do not share any confidential information in this form which you would be uncomfortable with our students or other potential supervisors knowing about; and

(c) LITE Lab@HKU desires to extend its impact and benefit other under-resourced organisations through reproduction of some of the student work product on LITE Lab@HKU's website, and project partners should be prepared to agree with the students to have some aspect of the student work project to be shared in this manner.

(d) The project deliverables are student work products and so there is no express or implied warranty as to their merchantability or being fit for purpose.

(e) In accordance with the Faculty of Law's policy from 2021/22, all experiential courses will be graded on a pass/fail basis.

Learn more about LITE Lab@HKU at https://litelab.law.hku.hk/

If you have any questions, please feel to contact Brian Tang at bwtang@hku.hk with the title "LITE Lab @HKU - Startup Project Partner Registration".

We would appreciate your completion of this online questionnaire by August 30, 2021 to enable us to start matching as early as possible at the start of semester.